Android development and money stuff

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About Johannes Borchardt

Johannes is the co-founder of ANDLABS, a company specialized in Android development. Starting his mobile career in 2008, he has been building up Android expertise since the beginning. He has helped several bluechip companies get their Android apps ready, gives talks on conferences on a regular basis and published several articles in field-related journals.
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When the iPhone and the first Android SDK hit the public back in 2007, the word ‘app’ was not very present. Today, everyone knows what an app is and more and more people are developing them. The markets are being flooded by new apps, every day about thousand of them are being published solely on the Android Market. Most developers don’t even get a chance to make a living by their apps because most times, there is a professional company doing a better job in shorter time because they have more resources. So why become an app developer? Just to try to be one of the few successful developers out of thousands? Here are 7 reasons why it’s great to be an app developer:

1. The users

When you are developing your own apps, and that is what most people do at the beginning, there comes a point when your app is released. The great thing now is that your app will probably reach more users than any other piece of software you have written ever has (A quick comparison: This blog, which is software too, gets about 5.000 impressions each month, the AL Voice Recorder gets about 750.000). And they will give you feedback. You will see whether your idea, implementation and enhancements will be well received or not pretty quickly. It’s really great to see how people are engaging in your software and help you to improve.

2. It’s highly agile

There is probably no other field in software development that’s as agile as app development is. The contact with the customer (either your users or the people that pay you) is tight, prototyping is rapid.

3. Ideas are welcome

Because the environment is highly agile, it is way more likely that your ideas will be listened to and implemented. In most cases, this is explicitly desired and most times the reason why you are getting a job or, if ideas are missing, not.

4. It’s an act of creation

Like most software development, app development is an act of creation. The difference lays in its agileness. Because of the fast prototyping, you can test and enjoy the result of your work really fast which is a great motivation.

5. There is room for try and error

When you don’t know how things work, you use try and error. That should happen in the beginning but become less and less as you advance on your field of development. Still, there is room for try and error when it comes to new features: When you don’t know whether your users will accept a new app or feature of yours and don’t have the time or money to do a survey, you simply publish it in the market or to your private beta testers. You will know whether your idea was an error really quick!

6. It’s fun

All the agility, the act creation, the room for own ideas and the user feedback result in one thing: App development is fun (most times)!

7. There is money

Because fun is great but doesn’t pay bills: Of course there’s money to make in app development. As long as your app doesn’t suck and your target audience is big enough, there’s no reason why your app shouldn’t be successful.

Conclusion

Personally, I think it’s useless to do things that are not great most of the times you do them. So to me and a lot other people, app development really is great and a great path to walk on.

What’s your path? Why do you think app development is great? Please feel free to tell us in the comments.